The Exorcist: Primeval Pazuzu is a diabolically brilliant prequel to the horror franchise featuring the demonic force that once possessed young Regan MacNeil. Director Seb Wyndow takes us far from the cobbled streets of Georgetown to the forgotten sands of ancient Mesopotamia, exploring the arcane origins of the demon known as Pazuzu. It is a tale that transcends time, weaving together disparate threads of human history with an ever-present primordial evil.
The film begins with a brief prologue set in an unspecified time when black obelisks and gothic spires litter the landscape of a desert city. Millions of enslaved humans bow in worship to their ruler sitting on a throne atop a colossal black pyramid covered in gold hieroglyphs. The camera approaches the throne from behind then pans around to show this supreme ruler—Pazuzu in the flesh. The grotesque demon depicted as a statue in the original Exorcist movie is now a living breathing monster.
Is this a vision of the ancient past or the far future? That is not clear—perhaps it is both. Around the eerie city are massive black marble statues of Pazuzu, before which humans perform blood rituals, sacrificing animals and even themselves. That is until something in the sky distracts them—a storm of comets heading toward Earth. The catastrophic impacts result in massive floods that destroy everyone and everything, including Pazuzu.
The film cuts to ancient Mesopotamia around 3000 BC where a cult has developed in devotion to a remnant Pazuzu statue from the lost antediluvian civilization. The cult worships the statue as a personification of the southwestern wind, believing Pazuzu to be protective against more sinister demons. But they do not know that Pazuzu is an ancient malevolent force that preexisted humanity and Earth itself. As more people worship Pazuzu, its spirit grows in power. The demon soon escapes the statue and begins possessing people, convincing them to commit devious acts. They levitate megalithic stones with their minds and construct intricate obelisks, pyramids, and statues of Pazuzu in various cities throughout the region. The more humans who worship the demon, the more powerful it becomes. With enough worshippers performing the proper rituals, Pazuzu can be summoned from the spiritual realm into physical form and retake its place on the throne as ruler of the human race and all of planet Earth.
As the sinister demon’s power grows, so does the level of horror, culminating in disturbing ritual human sacrifices depicted with eerily realistic practical effects. Pazuzu’s insidious influence spreads like a virus, rotting villages from within. The possessed manifest superhuman strength, reveal hidden knowledge, speak in tongues, and perform bizarre physics-defying feats to shock and awe others into submission. Chaos reigns beyond even the demon’s control, however; as members of the cult destroy each other, leading to the collapse of Mesopotamian civilization. Hence Pazuzu’s statues become buried in the sands of time once more.
The film skips ahead another 4,000 years to the Middle Ages when Christian knights on a crusade stumble upon the ruins of one of the buried Pazuzu statues. Upon excavating the relic, they unknowingly unearth a nightmare that begins to consume them. Tension escalates as the knights are driven to madness by Pazuzu’s malevolence. The demon possesses the crusaders and forces them to commit unspeakable acts “in the name of God.” Previously pious folks use blasphemous language while enacting deeply depraved behavior. The knights begin ruthlessly slaughtering innocent people, then each other, with each scene more sacrilegious and savage than the next. Pazuzu’s aim is to defile the reputation of Christians, weaken faith in God, and gain more power for itself, hoping to finally cultivate enough devoted followers to summon itself into physical reality. “I once ruled this planet and all its species,” the demon tells them, “And I shall reign once again…”
Amidst the murderous maelstrom, a beacon of hope emerges in the form of a courageous Christian monk, an old hermit who has spent the past four decades alone in a desert cave in silent prayer. The monk sees a vision of St. Michael the Archangel commanding him to leave his solitude and defeat the demon Pazuzu.
Trekking to the Holy Land, the hermit monk battles the possessed knights, as well as pagans and heretics, then ultimately a manifestation of the demonic beast itself. His painstaking struggle against Pazuzu symbolizes the eternal battle between light and darkness, faith and doubt. The climatic exorcism scene is nothing short of cinematic sorcery, using hallucinatory visuals and haunting soundscapes to capture the mystical turmoil the monk experiences when confronting the embodiment of pure evil.
The hermit monk manages to trap Pazuzu’s spirit in a stone statue of itself, though he sacrifices his own life in the process. The demonic statue is buried beneath the foundations of a Christian church to be guarded by the Knights Templar for eternity. The seemingly triumphant ending retains a lingering sense of unease, especially for those who have seen the 2005 film Dominion wherein the statue is rediscovered. It serves as a chilling reminder that the ancient evil you think has been vanquished may merely be biding its time, waiting for the perfect moment to resurface and plunge the world into infernal mayhem once more.
This theme is hammered home in the post-credits teaser set in the present day when archeologists scan a stone artifact of Pazuzu and render it as a 3D digital image. An AI chatbot is created based on ancient Mesopotamian mythology to answer questions for students in the voice of Pazuzu. What the programmers of the AI do not know is that within the black box of its Large Language Model lies a primeval supernatural force. The eldritch demon is now on the internet.
Coming soon… The Exorcist: Pazuzu Online